Friday, September 17, 2004

Thank You, Mr. President.
President George Herbert Walker Bush endeared himself to me the other day when he told an interviewer that his memory is getting selective in his old age (early 70s). He forgets things he should remember, and remembers things that could be well forgotten.
I have a few years on this Bush, and I can advise him it gets a little bit worse each year. It’s no big deal, It’s normal. It doesn’t mean you’re getting Alzheimer’s.
PatienceRecently I adopted that word as a personal slogan….motto….icon….whatever you want to call it. I use that word in all situations and circumstances. At home, at work, and especially on the road.
I’ve mentioned before that if you drive five miles you’re likely to have a close encounter with about a thousand cars going your direction or in oncoming lanes. Eight hundred cars will be driven by normal humans, 100 drivers will tend to be erratic and dangerous at times, and the remaining 100 can be maniacal and armed and dangerous.
Avoid eye contact except when a wave of the hand acknowledges a courteous act.
President White?Every politician is running for President. Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White is no exception. First he has to become governor. Barack Obama already has the U.S. Senate chair.
The Illinois secretary of state has an enormous political asset in his office’s control over drivers’ licenses.
We gaffers have to renew our licenses every year, so I was out at the Deerfield office last week going through the somewhat stressful renewal process.
The place was crowded with a few seniors and dozens of teenagers getting their first licenses.
I passed the road test without much trouble. But it seemed so ironic to me that I was being tested by a very capable and articulate generation X lady . In six decades I’ve driven several million miles with one accident. A driver jumped the center strip and totaled my car. Her insurer insisted on giving me $3,000 for my promise not to sue. That was a good deal for me, because he didn’t know I wasn’t going to sue. I am an advocate of mediation or binding arbitration.

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Krugman

Does the Illinois Republican Party Suffer a Death Wish?
I still can’t adjust to the idea that Illinois Republicans will be asked to send Alan Keyes, an itinerant entertainer who lives in a million dollar home in Maryland, to represent our state in Congress. He can go back to Maryland and charge $6,000, give or take a thousand, for one of his speeches.
There is a good chance that Keyes will received a record low number of votes, and his opponent, Barack Obama, a record high.
Obama is a long-shot to become our first black president. Well, not so long a shot. Fifty-fifty?
America’s Mayor??????Rudy Guiliani responded to the 9/11 disaster with leadership and direction, just as almost any American mayor would have responded to similar circumstances.
Guiliani is an enthusiastic supporter of Bush’s run for re-election. He glows as his backers hail him as "America’s mayor."
He’s not this American’s mayor. He’s an ambitious pol with his eyes set on succeeding George Bush to the presidency.

This is Garrison Keillor????Keilor is the Minnesotan who broadcast his gentle observations on life in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are better than average.
I though Keillor was apolitical. Boy, was I wrong. This is his salute to Bush in the magazine "In These Times."
"How did the party of Lincoln and liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their etch-a-sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?"